10 Ways to Find More Hours in Your Day

We all wish we had just a bit more time.

Just think what you could do with an extra hour or two each day: you could finally stick to an exercise routine, or spring-clean the house, or write your novel, or learn the guitar, or get a new qualification.

I can’t magically make all your days 25 hours long. But I can help you find more hours in your day for the things that really matter.

The first hour or half-hour of the day is often a great chance to work on something important, before other demands crowd in on you. And if you need your beauty sleep? Just get to bed half an hour earlier.

• Use Your Commute Productively
  How much time do you spend commuting every week? Unless you work from home, you’ve probably got at least a couple of hours each week when you’re traveling between your home and your workplace. 

Use your commuting time for something useful. If you drive, you could listen to audio books. If you take the bus or train, you could read a book rather than grabbing a free newspaper. And if your workplace is quite close by, you could try walking or cycling to work — this builds exercise into the natural rhythm of your day.

• Tackle the Important Tasks First
  Once you get to work, take a few minutes to prioritize your tasks. Get the important ones done first (not the easy ones, or even the urgent ones). You can afford to spend at least an hour working on big, important tasks rather than on all those little urgent ones.

If you work like this, you’ll usually save time: the urgent tasks will still get done, and you won’t spend hours procrastinating over the important ones.

• Don't Check Email So Often
  Your colleagues and clients can wait for a few hours — or even a day or two — for you to reply to their emails. If there’s something truly urgent, they’ll pick up the phone. 

Keep your inbox closed when you’re working, and only open it when you’re ready to spend 30 minutes or so dealing with emails. It’s much more efficient to batch-process your emails than to keep popping in and out of your inbox to deal with individual ones.

• Reduce Interruptions
  If colleagues have a habit of hanging around your desk to chat, or if the phone is constantly ringing, you might find that it takes you half the day to finish a simple task like writing a letter. Constant interruptions don’t just eat up time — they also break your concentration. 

When you’ve got a big task to focus on, let your calls go to voicemail. If you have an office door, close it. If you work in a cubicle, wear headphones: having them on makes it less likely that people will try to strike up a conversation (you don’t have to listen to anything through them).

• Stay Focused on Your Work
  You might have heard the saying “procrastination is the thief of time.” When you want more hours in the day, procrastination can be a real problem. A few minutes chatting, browsing the web, updating your Facebook status, and so on, can easily turn into hours of wasted time over the course of a day. 

When you’re working, work. If your concentration is slipping, take a proper break: go and get a glass of water, or stretch your legs a bit. And if you’re facing a difficult task, try breaking it into small steps or stages so that it’s easier to tackle.

• Go Home on Time
  If you’re supposed to finish work at 4pm, but you never make it out of the office door until 6pm at the earlier, then it’s no wonder you don’t have enough hours in the day. 

In some jobs, it is difficult to get away on time (if all your colleagues work late, you might feel obliged to do the same). But if you’re staying because you only ever seem to get any work done in a mad dash at the end of the day, then your working habits need to change.

• Delegate Some Chores
  Perhaps you seem to be the only person in your household who’s capable of unstacking the dishwasher or ironing the clothes. If your evenings get taken up with a long list of chores, see whether you can delegate some of those. 

Your partner, housemates, or kids can pitch in and help out. Even if you just free up 20 or 30 minutes every evening, you’ll have a bit of extra time to spend on something important to you.

• Eat Dinner at Home
  Although going out for dinner might seem like it saves time (after all, you don’t have to cook) — you’ve got the time cost of traveling to the restaurant, ordering the food, waiting for it to arrive, paying the bill … and it might well be faster just to cook and eat at home. 

If you don’t have much time to cook during the week, try making extra portions at the weekend so that you can freeze some. That way, you’ve got an almost-instant meal (and one that’s probably healthier and cheaper than a restaurant meal, too).

• Limit Your TV Watching
  If you put the TV on as soon as you get in from work, it’s easy to end up spending hours slumped on the sofa. Instead of watching whatever happens to be showing, try watching just one or two programs each night. 

You might also want to have at least a couple of TV-free evenings; a great chance to read a good book, or to work on a project around the house.

Do you have any great tips for finding more hours in the day? Does one of the above ideas work well for you? Share your thoughts with us in the comments…

Written on 3/20/2012 by Ali Luke. Ali is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and a writing coach. She blogs about writing on her site, Aliventures.com, and has a free ebook “How to Find Time For Your Writing” available when you join her writing newsletter here.

Photo Credit: ~twon~